Consultancy Project: Research

The incorporation of native animal habitat into green areas in cities is an aspect of urban landscape design that has received little attention. Under the Radar is an Artweb project that seeks to draw attention to the volcanic nature of Auckland's urban field by highlighting the lizard populations that find there home there. The project creates 'lizard gardens' where humans can encounter these cryptic creatures that they live among.

Artweb is an urban planning and design project based on principles of self-organization. An inter-disciplinary work-in-progress, it brings together artists, scientists, and landscape architects to develop the marginal and under-utilized spaces of the urban field. Working with urban and community planners Artweb uses GIS to redefine the complex network of forces and flows throughout the city, and provide opportunities for physical projects and artistic intervention.
The extended essay is under Texts, or go to www.artweb.co.nz

Set apart from the normal realm of moral judgement, the medieval garden of love is usually seen as a site that embodies the carnal and reprehensible human desires that humans must renounce in order to find God. This research proposes instead that visual and verbal representations of the garden of love show it as a place where humans encounter the operations of emergence and difference, and through an immersion in the paradoxical condition of love discover a more vital humanity.

The extended essay is under Texts.

Sacred groves mediate between two worlds by focusing and aligning the significance of special places through care and propitiation. Trees are planted as an operation that differentiates the site from the natural order. Sacrifice reconnects with that order. By permitting the passage of the sacred, the grove functions as a portal between the sacred and the profane.

See the extended essay under Texts.

The Nonlinear Landscape Design Studio was run from 1999 to 2004 in Unitec's Department of Landscape and Plant Science. Its purpose was to expand the operational dimension of design process by an explicit engagement with the inherent characteristics of nonlinear systems: their unpredictability and their emergent and catalytic properties. Students were invited to become accustomed to "not knowing what they were doing."
The results are discussed in "Exploration & Discovery" under Texts.

Without prior object or content, this design process does not follow rules but creates them. The qualities to be found in landscape design that travels without a destination can be found in all forms of work which eschew method, despite discipline, genre, location or technical form; despite the material and cultural conditions that inform them. If design is conceived as a process of discovery the result of which is not already imaged, and if the process of design is to be as free as possible, then the representational order should be correspondingly unconditional.

The studio took the form of an examination of random development in Auckland's central city. It was a response to the wide call for an urban design masterplan for that city's waterfront. Students used a stochastic or aleatory approach both to the selection and design of specific sites, and created techniques that would help them avoid knowing what would happen next in their process. At each stage the results were combined with the results of the previous phase of design.

The operator for the studio was "the parasite" (from Michel Serres). Within any system an ordering principle is at work. This principle selects, modifies, adapts and organises according to certain sets of determining factors. Interruptions, interferences & glitches are dealt with according to the rationale that constitutes the system. The urban landscape has often been represented as a system, ordered by instrumental hierarchies to do with the reticulation of traffic, information, capital, legislature, water, and other matter-energies.

Traditional urban design methodology also has the properties of a system, based on the model of linear progression, of movement from analysis to design solution. It therefore
has its own hierarchy of dos and don'ts, of valid and invalid moves. When interference is encountered, the system integrates it and thereby passes from a simple to a more complex stage. Thus the interference (the parasite) constitutes the condition of possibility of the system's development. By way of disorder it produces a more complex order.

The parasite invents something new. It expresses a logic that was irrational until now. Thus turbulence from outside the system prevents the system from implosion, from weakening or decline. Such interference, however, can also come from inside the system, from conditions intrinsic to the system itself, an internal chaos. Perhaps this is the more interesting event for landscape architecture

This studio proposes that if natural systems are nonlinear open systems, and cities are nonlinear open systems, then landscape design (which deals with both) might reveal interesting aspects
of these systems if it too is open, nonlinear and dissipative. Students as follows: 1 Orson Waldock, 2 Susannah Kitching, 3 Mandy McMullin, 4, Glenice Anderson, 5 Dean Roberts, 6 Scott Greenhalgh, 7 Jonathon Wong.

Most Pacific Island states are subject to periodic devastation by cyclones. While their ecologies are adapted to this disturbance, their modern towns are not as their infrastructures are now largely concrete and steel. Since these settlements are components of complex adaptive coastal systems this project explores the possibility of a disturbance ecology approach to the design of Pacific settlements. It uses NetLogo to model rainforest recovery patterns and then develop settlement designs based on these. MLA students did the initial mapping.